Day: March 1, 2024

Psychology Of Trumpism

College of Political Knowledge

2024 Election Series

I know….I know….this has been covered on many levels….however enough has not be said or written about the radical supporters of our former president…..much more needs to be aired so that the American do not err on the side of stupidity.

With all that said….why do the supporters of Trump become so rabid in that support?

This may answer some of the questions….

Americans today see two contradictory futures looming in the middle distance: In one scenario, Donald Trump is convicted of serious crimes and sent to prison. In the second, he returns to the presidency in 2025.

The urgent uncertainty of it all may be a reason why, in recent weeks, Trump has summoned forth some of the most incendiary rhetoric ever employed by an American presidential candidate. He has called for the execution of the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He now urges police to shoot shoplifters. He has begun characterizing his political adversaries as subhuman “vermin” who must be “rooted out.” Parroting the Third Reich while claiming (no doubt truthfully, in this case) that he has never read “Mein Kampf,” Trump has declared that immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia “poison the blood” of the United States.

And yet Trump is cruising to a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination, and many national polls show him beating Joe Biden in November. With ominous foreboding, the entire January/February issue of The Atlantic magazine was dedicated to one momentous question: “What if Trump wins?” Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s editor, characterizes Trump as an “antidemocratic demagogue,” one “completely devoid of decency.” If Trump wins again, warns Mark Leibovich, author of “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission” (2022), then we Americans will need to let go of the soothing notion that “this is not who we are.”

“Who is ‘we’ anyway?” Leibovich asks. “Because it sure seems like a lot of this ‘we’ keeps voting for Trump.”

How is it possible that a twice-impeached former president facing 91 criminal counts can now be favored to return to the Oval Office? Why do his supporters not recoil when Trump promises to unleash an authoritarian regime as president and to assume the role of dictator on Day One? What explains his enduring appeal?

https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-mass-psychology-of-trumpism/

My only answer to this is one of my favorite quotes….”Stupidity Is The Deliberate Cultivation Of Ignorance”….and there sums up the whole of the GOP.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

500,000 Dead And Maimed

Now that Ukraine has taken a backseat to the other ‘war’ across the pond the news seems to glaze over much of the reports coming out of that conflict.

Of course we in the West get the news when it is something dire that could push more money to start flowing again into Ukraine.

Like this recent report….

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned allies on Saturday that an “artificial deficit” of arms for his country risks giving Russia breathing space, highlighting the need for artillery and long-range weapons after his military chief said he was withdrawing troops from the eastern city of Avdiivka, “the first major gain Russian forces have achieved since May of last year,” reports the New York Times. Zelensky spoke to the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of security and foreign policy officials, per the AP. Ukraine is back on the defensive against Russia in the nearly two-year-old war, hindered by low ammunition supplies and a shortage of personnel. “Ukrainians have proven that we can force Russia to retreat,” Zelensky said. “We can get our land back, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin can lose, and this has already happened more than once on the battlefield.”

See a report for the spending of more US dollars.

But let’s think about what has happened as a result of 2 years to basically total war in Ukraine.

As we approach the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s worth reflecting on who bears the main responsibility for the subsequent “inter-imperialist US-Russia proxy war,” an epic slaughter that produced 500,000 deaths and injuries so far and more than 300,000 fatalities (exact figures are hard to come by).

As we approach the anniversary could all this death and destruction could have been avoided?

Yes it could have been.

The Ukraine War could have been averted if Ukraine’s Western tool of a president Volodymyr Zelensky had said just five words after being elected in 2019:  “Ukraine will not join NATO.”

Five words versus 500,000 casualties.

Think about that.

As Benjamin Abelow pointed out in his short, expertly crafted, and Noam Chomsky-endorsed 2022 bookHow the West Brought War to Ukraine, the standard Western narrative claiming that Putin is “an insatiable, Hitler-like expansionist who invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked land grab” is complete nonsense. The real cause of the February 2022 invasion that led to the war was the misguided and reckless policy direction taken by Washington and its imperial tool NATO over the last three decades.

500,000 Dead and Maimed in Ukraine, Enough Already

Sorry but it is time for peace….or there will be nothing left of Ukraine for Zelenskyy to rule….

The mass slaughter on both sides in this long battle was a measure of the strategic value of the city to both sides, but it is also emblematic of the shocking human cost of this war, which has degenerated into a brutal and bloody war of attrition along a nearly static front line. Neither side made significant territorial gains in the entire 2023 year of fighting, with a net gain to Russia of a mere 188 square miles, or 0.1% of Ukraine.

And while it is the Ukrainians and Russians fighting and dying in this war of attrition with over half a million casualties, it is the United States, with some its Western allies, that has stood in the way of peace talks. This was true of talks between Russia and Ukraine that took place in March 2022, one month after the Russian invasion, and it is true of talks that Russia tried to initiate with the United States as recently as January 2024.

https://original.antiwar.com/mbenjamin/2024/02/21/after-two-years-of-war-in-ukraine-its-time-for-peace/

Nobody cares about who has died or why just that Putin is being confronted and the US has a permanent bad guy to blame everything on.  Most people cannot see past their chest thumping bullsh*t.

At what point is enough enough?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”